Hitting the road on his Éxodo tour in late May, Mexicana star Peso Pluma will showcase his mix on música Mexicana, hip-hop, trap and reggaeton to arenas and festivals across North America, Mexico and Latin America with a band playing traditional instruments.
At FOH is Fernando Guzman – who has worked with Mexican artists including Juan Gabriel, Caifanes, Cafe Tacuba, Jenni Rivera, Espinoza Paz, Chiquis, Tigres del Norte, Manu Chao and Benny Ibarra – and a Solid State Logic Live L550 Plus mixing console. Returning to live work following a tem-year break to work as SSL’s Live Product Specialist, he is a 30-year veteran of the industry. In 2023, he toursed with Peso Pluma, mixing most of his shows that on an SSL L200 supplied by 3G Productions, along with one Bus+ and a Fusion. For the Éxodo album tour, Solotech is supplying a primary L550 Plus and a reserve L350 Plus console together with a rack of five SSL Bus+ analogue bus compressors and two SSL Fusion analogue multi-processors.
Guzman notes the 96kHz, 64-bit performance of the console as key to his choice. ‘You can feel all this separation in the sounds and there is space to allocate every single sound in the mix,’ he says Guzman, ‘Plus, it has real SSL analogue preamps, not an algorithm.
‘I’m a geek about time aligning and I’m very conscious about what’s happening with latency,’ he continues. ‘So low latency and the way the system manages latency is big for me in the decision-making about the console. That’s why I also prefer to mostly use SSL’s internal plug-ins, because they have very ultra-low latency, no more than one or two samples. I mix on buses, not on VCAs or DCAs and, in my opinion, the best feature of the Live console is the summing section.’
On last year’s shows, Guzman passed every bus through SSL’s Blitzer compressor plug-in, but for the Éxodo tour he has switched to hardware processing, substituting five Bus+ and two Fusion units for the internal software: ‘I’m moving from an algorithm to an analogue device to do the same job, and it’s working just fantastic. I feel that the quality in the mix has very much been improved.
‘As a front-of-house engineer, the PA engineer is my partner in crime. The excellent results that we get, night after night, are the result of two people, not just me, so I really must mention the great work of Julio Valdez from 3G, who was our system engineer on last year’s tour leg, and our current system engineer, Ben Malone, from Solotech.’
Peso Pluma’s band play a variety of traditional Mexican instruments, all picked up wirelessly, including a tololoche, or upright bass; three guitars, including a requinto (a smaller version of the classical six-string guitar) and a 12-string bajo quinto; and two alto horns (or saxors), known as charchetas in Mexico. Guzman assigns the instruments, also including an electric bass, individually or in combination to separate buses and processes them through the Bus+ units. ‘I really wanted to keep a consistent flavour at every single step of the processing,’ he says, explaining his decision to use only SSL outboard processors. ‘Every single bus individually gets an analogue piece to control the dynamics.’
In música Mexicana, the tololoche contributes melody as well as percussion via two piezoelectric pickups, one on the body and another on the neck, while the two charchetas add harmony. Together, the three instruments form the foundation of most songs.
‘Then, the harmony between the three guitars is very powerful. That’s the drive in the mix. And we have two singers in this show; the first, of course, is the lead singer, Peso Pluma, and the second is a trombone. The trombone plays as a vocal in the mix, so you hear the Trombone talking to the singer, like a conversation,’ he says. ‘This band is amazing; with ties to Mexico, including Sinaloa, the pure source of the best Mexican music of this kind.’
Guzman sends the music master to a Fusion multi-processor: ‘The Fusion and the first Bus+ compressor in the rack are in a cascade and are inserted into the music master, so the Fusion is not touching any vocals,’ he says. ‘If we enhance that beautiful, natural character of the console with Fusion the result is amazing. It’s the palette colouring the mix. The Fusion basically provides the way to make this mix beautiful, to make it shine, make it warm and to make it appeal to the senses.’
Following shows at both Coachella weekends in April, the Éxodo tour begins with the Sueños Festival in Chicago. The North American leg includes more than 35 shows, many in arenas, including dates in New York, Miami, Dallas, Las Vegas and San Diego before coming to a close in October in Montville, Connecticut.
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